On the 17th of May 2017 a workshop and training of the project team took place. The discussion concerned the description of the documents submitted to the project. The members of the research team were trained to work independently with the project site.
On the 1st of April in Hall “Stephan Gechev” in the Embassy of Greece in Sofia a conference on the topic “Merchants and entrepreneurs on the Balkans in the 19th and 20th century: from an economic enterprise towards cultural communication” took place. On the conference Assoc. Prof. Yura Konstantinova gave a report about the merchants in Thessaloniki during the 1860s and presented the project “Thessaloniki and the Bulgarians – history, memory, present”.
On the 29th of March 2017 in Sofia an international seminar on the topic of the project took place. Our guests were Prof. Olga Katsiardi-Hering from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Dr. Maria Litina from the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece. At the seminar Prof. Katsiardi-Hering gave a lecture on the topic “Port cities in Eastern Mediterranean, 18-19 cent.: а typology particularly on the cases of Trieste, Smyrna, Thessaloniki”. Her presentation can be found here.
An internal seminar on the topic of the project took place on the 9th of March from 1 pm in the building of the Institute of Balkan Studies and Centre of Thracology. The discussion concerned the principles of the construction of the data base, the methodology of the research and administrative questions.
Prof. D.Sc. Raya Zaimova gave a public lecture on the topic „The Catholics in Thessaloniki” on the 2nd of March, 2017, from 6 pm in Hall 233 of the Faculty for Classic and Modern Philologies of the Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”. The lecture, which was organised by the Centre for intercultural communication and mediation, is part of the cycle “Shared thoughts on religious diversity”. The talk was attended not only by undergraduate and doctoral students, but also by citizens interested in the topic.
